Fireworks AI, a Redwood City-based GenAI inference platform provider, has snapped $52 million in Series B funding. As per the company, with this round, the total funding raised by the company accounts for $77 million and it is valued at $552 million.
The investment round was led by Sequoia Capital (which invested Statsig and Iconic AI) with participation from NVIDIA, AMD, and MongoDB. Previous investors include Benchmark, Databricks Ventures, former Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman, former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg, Airtable CEO Howie Liu, Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, as well as executives from LinkedIn, Confluent, Meta, and OnePassword.
Funds utilisation
Fireworks AI intends to use the funds to expand the team, and enhance its platform, enabling developers to quickly move AI applications from prototype to production.
Sequoia General Partner Sonya Huang said: “Fireworks AI is perfectly positioned to lead this industry shift. Their team’s expertise in building high-performance inference stacks and innovative approach to enabling compound AI systems will empower developers with scalable AI solutions that were previously accessible only to tech giants.”
What does FireworksAI do?
Led by CEO Lin Qiao, Fireworks AI provides an inference engine to build production-ready, compound AI systems. Using minimal human-curated data, ultra-fast LoRA fine-tuning allows developers to quickly customise models to their specific needs, transitioning from dataset preparation to querying a fine-tuned model in minutes. These models are deployed, maintaining the same performance and cost benefits as its base models.
Since its inception, the company has empowered developers with effective inference for popular models. Today, the company serves over 100 state-of-the-art models in text, image, audio, embedding, and multimodal formats, optimised for latency, throughput, and cost per token.
“Unlike proprietary mega models that are generic, non-private, and hard to customise, Fireworks AI provides smaller, production-grade models that can be deployed privately and securely,” said CEO Lin Qiao.
Clientele base
Developers at AI startups like Cresta, Cursor, and Liner, as well as digital-native giants like DoorDash, Quora, and Upwork, use Fireworks AI for its specialised models
Partnerships
Since its debut, Fireworks has made major upgrades to its platform and inked numerous deals with providers in the AI stack.
These include partnerships with Nvidia, AMD, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Oracle Cloud for model infrastructure optimization. The company also partnered with the cross-platform NoSQL database MongoDB to create an interactive retrieval-augmented generation or RAG product, which helps bring authoritative real-time data into large language models to increase accuracy and reduce errors.
